Posts Tagged webinars

I’ve recently started delivering public webinars. At this point I’m delivering them with partners. One of my partners asked how I would measure the success of our webinar. I hadn’t given this any thought. However, I could see the value in evaluating them.

I started by looking for an existing tool I could use or adapt. My research consisted of online search and asking my online network. Here are links to my question posed on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you are interested you can view the responses by following discussion threads from original post. The LinkedIn discussion is the most valuable.

Most useful tip I received (from several people) was to determine my objectives for the webinar. Use this to decide what to measure.

At this point I am running webinars to (1) provide useful, actionable information on selected topics to learning professionals, and (2) generate ongoing conversation with them about how I can help them to transform learning in their organisation. The first goal is education. The second goal is marketing.

With this in mind I reviewed online resources. Thanks to @roseg on Twitter for helping me find articles on the topic. The two most useful posts I found for my purposes are:

Webinar tools have in-built metrics. I am currently using Zoom Webinar. The reporting functionality is basic.

No-one was aware of a generic tracker (and there were experts who I trust on this point in the LinkedIn conversation).

It’s important to track engagement during the webinar. Can be done in a variety of ways.

Perhaps the most important metric is audience retention. How many people are still in the webinar at the end of the session? (One seasoned webinar presenter suggested this was the key metric he looked at.) Also, look for drop off points by noting number of people on webinar at 15 minute intervals. Think about what might be leading to drop-offs?

It’s worth noting that the people who engaged in LinkedIn discussion are predominantly learning professionals. Their interest / perspective was about what happened during the webinar and how participants apply content. I supplemented their input with the marketing considerations from resources I found online.

At this point I’ve created a tracker in Excel. The metrics on this first version of my tracker are listed below. You can view it online (and download it if it’s of any value to you). If you do use it I’d appreciate your feedback and suggestions for improvement. I will refine it or evolve to something else.

I’ve yet to figure out how to measure click through rate (i.e. number of people who registered for webinar compared with no. who clicked to registration page). I may need to change some of the tools I’m using for marketing and registration of webinars.

Potential future additions:

Audience interaction

Exit surveys

Source of webinar registrations

Webinar Costs

Attendee to qualified lead conversion rate

Big thanks to people who offered to share resources and/or experience with me, especially:

Matthew Mason – looking forward to chatting about how xAPI could be used for this purpose

David Smith – (digital and virtual world guru) – who offered a discussion